Anjeanette, Liskey, and Reynolds, from Volume 3:1

Anjeanette knew since about 5 years old that she wanted to be an artist. She grew up traveling the USA, and decided to never grow up and keep traveling. Her preferred mediums are Charcoal, Oil & Acrylic paints and Digital paintings and photography. She was educated at the Savannah College of Art and Design, graduating in 1999 with a BFA in Illustration, Magna Cum Laude. She has shown in several solo and group fine art gallery exhibitions in Houston, Texas, Detroit and Lansing, Michigan, and all over Tennessee. She was featured in a 6-page interview in Corel Painter Magazine, as well as several other small features in various publications.

Anjeanette provided her piece "Luce" for the front and back cover art of Volume 3:1.

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Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. He is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi. His first collection of stories, This Side of The River, was released in 2014. His photographs have been published in Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine and Midwestern Gothic. He lives in Texas.

Liskey's "Anjo" appears on page 7 of Volume 3:1.

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Ruth Ann Reynolds is a Northern California Native who takes the word GirlScout to a deeper level. Trained in Emergency Medicine, she knows how to “seize the moment” and capture images that are typically lost due to overthinking the shot. She’s lived in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years. Recently, she was a finalist in Oregon ArtBeats #OregonMoment contest. Her image was shown at the prestigious Blue Sky Photography Gallery in Portland in 2014. She’s relocating to Houston, Texas where she will be pursuing her lifelong dream in Cardiac ultrasound.


Reynolds' untitled landscape image appears on page 34 of Volume 3:1.

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Flip through Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1 to see another 6 pieces of visual art by Anjeanette, Linskey, and Reynolds!

Diane Gage, from Volume 3:1

A San Diego-based poet and artist, Diane Gage's work appeared recently in Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming (2013). A selection of her Moon Haiku will appear later this year in a series of artist books by members of San Diego Book Arts. Gage was recently featured and interviewed at Blue Vortext Publishers.

Gage contribued two poems— "Picasso's Loaves" and "Bride Bared by Bird Bachelors"—in Volume 3:1. Below is an excerpt from the former:

His dark eyes focus

out the window, looking

toward the light source,

corners of his mouth

lifting slightly—maybe a whisper
of Giaconda in the lips?

Picasso and the Loaves by Robert Doisneau

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To read Gage's poems in full, flip to pages 38-40 in Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1!

Alan Britt, from Volume 3:1

Alan Britt served as judge for the 2013 The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award. His interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem aired on Pacifica Radio, January 2013. A new interview for Lake City Lights is available at http://lakecitypoets.com/AlanBritt.html. His latest books are Lost Among the Hours, Parabola Dreams (with Silvia Scheibli), and Alone with the Terrible Universe. He teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

Alan had two poems —"Optical Illusion" and "Garden of Earthly Delights"— published in Volume 3:1. Below is an excerpt from the latter:

Those mysterious ergot dots sometimes appearing as beautiful monsters in Bosch paintings . . . Hieronymus, wild man of Western art, early surreal genius signaling
Goya, Dalí, Tanguy and Bacon. There’s a strange excitement upon entering Bosch  
. . . entering the brain of a beautiful heretic . . . almost like entering a house you’ve
lived in for 100 years, but suddenly rooms take on a fresh perspective, friends
devouring the fabric of sanity, dripping acid on the upper brain (despite God’s
pleadings)

The Garden of Eden by Jan the Elder Brueghel

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To read both of Alan's brilliantly orante pieces, flip to page 35 of Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1.

Jacqueline Sheehan, from Volume 3:1

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is also a psychologist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost & Found, was published in 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost & Found has been on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been optioned for film by Katherine Heigl, star of Grey's Anatomy.

In Volume 3:1, Sheehan contributed an excerpt from Lost & Found that concerns a woman named Tess who has, of all things, synesthesia. Below is an excerpt:

Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did but they could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.

1913 painting by Wassily Kandinsky

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Open up Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1 to read Sheehan's entire excerpt!